What would happen if the course of American history had taken a different turn in the 1940s? This is now a suitable subject for the literary lions, as demonstrated by Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004). But a year before Chabon was born, Philip K. Dick earned his first Hugo award for his bold alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle, a work that has gradually gained acceptance as a modern classic.

This turn of events would have delightedDick, who died in 1982 just as his bookswere beginning to find an audience outsideof the sci-fi field. During most of his life,he struggled financially, and while Dicklonged to build a reputation as a seriouswriter, he found himself published by AceBooks, an imprint whose greatest claim tofame was binding pulp novels together as“two-for-ones” so that fans could read, forexample, both Mike Brett’s Scream Streetand John Creighton’s Stranglehold in asingle thirty-five cent volume.

Needless to say, a stint in the Iowa Writers'Workshop is a much better starting pointfor those aspiring to literary fame. Dick himself realized how difficult it would be to extricate himself from the “genre fiction” pigeonhole in which he had been placed, but did not abandon his hopes for a highbrow audience. Around the time he wrote The Man in the High Castle, Dick noted that it might "take twenty to thirty years to succeed as a literary writer." In a surprising twist (worthy of his own topsy-turvy plots), Dick did become a highbrow success thirty years later—but did so posthumously, largely on the basis of the works he wrote as a young man.

In The Man in the High Castle, the United States has lost World War II and is occupied by foreign powers. The eastern seaboard has fallen under German control, while the West Coast is under the sway of Japan. The South is a Vichy-type regime with the strings pulled by Nazi collaborators, while the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions are quasi-independent, buffer zones separating the two occupying powers. Tensions between Germany and Japan simmer beneath the surface, and the threat of a nuclear conflict between them is ever present.

In this highly charged setting, Dick develops his several story lines. We follow the secretive course of “Mr. Baynes,” a German defector attempting to enlist the support of the Japanese against the machinations of Joseph Goebbels. He is working through a contact in the Japanese trade mission, Nobusuke Tagomi, who is ignorant of Baynes’ agenda, and is caught up in his own private dramas—including a puzzling visit to another alternative universe. A third sub-plot concerns Frank Frink, an aspiring jewelry designer who is trying to hide his Jewish ancestry in order to avoid arrest. Robert Childan, an American dealer in collector items, is another significant character whose ability to internalize the speech and behavior patterns of his mostly Japanese clientele has helped him achieve a degree of success in the occupied territories.

Dick once claimed that he relied on the I Ching to help him develop the plot for this novel—and even blamed it for elements of the story that left him unsatisfied. As is so often the case with Dick, the story echoes the circumstances under which it was written. In this case, the I Ching plays a role in the plot, as characters consult it to guide their course of action. The novel also reminds us of its construction in the character of Hawthorne Abendsen, who is the enigmatic “Man in the High Castle,” an author who is writing a fictional account of alternative history, in which United States and its allies win the war. And Abendsen relies on the I Ching to write this novel-within-a-novel.

Reality blurs within the story. And the distinction between the story and outside reality—as manifested in Dick’s personal life—also grows fuzzy (another trademark of this author’s oeuvre). In a charged moment in the book, Nobusuke Tagomi finds himself in Abendsen's imagined world where the United States was the victor in World War II, and this strange situation of a “true” alternate history in this midst of Dick’s contrived one, opens up the dizzying possibility of an infinite regress, a literary equivalent of two mirrors facing each other.

These are precisely the crazy twists that delight Dick’s ardent fans. While other works of speculative fiction often seem formulaic, Dick stands out for the kaleidoscopic and uninhibited quality of his storytelling. The reader feels that Dick is almost experiencing these stories first-hand, and has given us a rare glimpse into his own psyche. Above all, this is a novel that seems as much a dream or a vision, and when we finally encounter the “Man in the High Castle” in the closing pages, it is hard to suppress the suspicion that we have met the dreamer in person, and that it is Philip K. Dick himself.

The book betrays it genre origins at every turn. The writing is covered by a pulp fiction veneer, and the prose is (as is often the case with this writer) less than Proustian. Yet if you care about literature, don’t think for one moment that you can dismiss this novelist as a sci-fi hack. Dick’s fingerprints are everywhere in contemporary culture—books, movies, television, video games, graphic novels, you name it—and spending some time with The Man in the High Castle will help you understand why.

Can this be for real? Have I entered some alternative universe? Do I actually see the pulp sci-fi novels of Philip K. Dick infiltrating the distinguished shelf of classics published by The Library of America? Yes, there it is, “DICK” emblazoned across the discreet black background,with red, white andblue trim - sittingbetween JamesFenimore Cooperand John DosPassos. Whatplanet am I on?

Yes, this feels likea scene in one ofDick’s alternativereality novels, where somehow history (lit history in this case) gets re-written and all familiar guidelines disappear into the fifth dimension. But Dick’s arrival in the pantheon of American novelists is no sudden plot twist. No American writer has seen such a dramatic turnaround in reputation over the last half century. But the shift has happened gradually, fueled by the interest of film-makers (Ridley, Scott, John Woo, Paul Verhoeven), younger writers (most notably Jonathan Lethem, who edits the Dick volume for The Library of America), and a growing cadre of fans and admirers.

Today, the film rights to a Dick short story can bring in close to $2 million to the author’s estate. But during his lifetime, Dick was so poor he bought horsemeat from a pet shop for dinner. His drug habit — Dick would pop pills by the dozens — also ate into his income, and fed his paranoia and psychotic episodes. As a result, Dick churned out novels and tales in mad rush to stay financially afloat, and set down the visionary images and concepts of his over-heated imagination. His fervor resulted in a oeuvre of 44 published novels, countless short stories, and (most intimidating of all) his so-called Exegisis, some 8,000 pages of journal writings, documenting his mental strife, visions and metaphysical speculations.

Even his best known books, including the four novels featured in The Library of America collection, reflect the haste with which they were written. Dick’s prose is often lackluster, his plot lines full of holes, his characters as flat as a cardboard cutout. Why, one might ask, do such works merit recognition as American classics?

But Dick does matter – perhaps even more now than during his lifetime. He showed a different way of responding to the growing awareness that reality in literature (and life) is problematic. While other writers retreated into word games and an exploration of “discourses" (to use the fashionable term for this linguistic approach), Dick accepted the challenge head-on. If reality was constructed, confused and beset by issues, Dick would try to map the maze, especially the most labyrinthine corners of it.

His books revolve around one grand truth: namely, that things are not what they seem. The idea is a simple one, but Dick builds it into grand superstructures of ontology and epistemology translated into sci-fi narratives. In Ubik, the reader is still uncertain halfway through the novel whether the main protagonists are alive or dead. (See how many students in Creative Writing 101 can pull that off!). In The Man in the High Castle, we shift into an alternative universe in which World War II turned out differently. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, we explore the foundation of religious beliefs and the nature of human existence, but in fanciful ways never anticipated by the philosophers.

Today we see both serious fiction and popular culture moving in the same directions that Dick so brilliantly explored in his writings. Even when he is not listed in the credits or acknowledgements, Dick’s influence is palpable. Films as different as The Matrix and The Truman Show reflect distinctive Dick twists in their storylines. Recent novels by Michael Chabon and Philip Roth also build from an “alternative reality” version of World War II that is very much in the spirit of Dick’s work.

The Library of America volume offers a excellent introduction to this visionary writer. Jonathan Lethem is the ideal editor for this work, although I am disappointed that he did not write a lengthy introduction for the volume (or at least include his great essay “You Don’t Know Dick” – with its answering opening line: “Not like I know Dick.”) Let’s also hope that the publisher follows up with Dick’s later novels, including his unfairly neglected Valis trilogy, which ranks among the finest experimental works of fiction of its era.

In short, with some 50 books to his credit, Dick cannot be appreciated in a single gulp. But if you haven’t yet experienced the mind-expanding writings of this seminal author, The Library of America collection is the right place to start. But be forewarned: once you let Dick into your head, things will never seem the same again.